Just A Gal From Glidden: Lessons learned beneath the Dankin elevators

By Kate Winquist

Agriculture Safety Week always gets me thinking about the little lessons you learn growing up on a farm. Not the big lectures. The quiet ones that simply became part of everyday life.

I always felt safe with my dad.

Something is missing from the landscape now as I drive down Highway 21 between Glidden and Eatonia. A new landscape is rising with the development of the Dankin Colony, but it’s just not the same.

Those old grain elevators at Dankin used to stand like prairie sentinels. I spent many hours riding around them with Dad on the tractor as he worked the land. Whether it was seeding, summerfallowing or harvesting, I always felt safe with him behind the wheel of that old Case tractor.

My dad was a small farmer. He did almost everything himself, with the odd bit of help during harvest. Up early. Home before dark. He did his own mechanical work too. I don’t ever remember a piece of machinery going into town to be fixed. He just looked after things. He didn’t need fancy new equipment. He got the job done with what he had.

Late last year I spoke with Dave from the McGee Colony. He asked me about being the gal from Glidden. Dave told me he had lived at the Glidden Colony for 55 years before moving to McGee in 2011.

I told him about my family ties to the area and mentioned my dad, George Drummond.

“Oh yes, yes,” he said right away.

He knew Dad well. Dad had a reputation for his handiwork and mechanical abilities. He had a lathe in his shop and always seemed to be fixing something for a neighbour.

I was always fascinated by the tools in Dad’s shop, but I learned early not to touch anything in there. Little fingers did not belong. And don’t look directly at the sparks flying off the welder or you might go blind.

It wasn’t the cleanest shop in the world, but somehow Dad always knew where everything was. And he could make use of darn near anything.

Trips to the nuisance ground were a regular occurrence. Not so much to dump garbage, but to see what treasures might be left behind. Glidden’s nuisance ground was, and still is, just a few miles east of the village.

As a kid, I loved that trip. Turning off the highway, across the railway tracks and up the winding hill.

Those trips came with a safety lesson too. I was never allowed outside the truck cab while Dad backed up and unloaded garbage into the pit below.

I remember one trip with my brother Garth and sister Carrie. Carrie and I were in the cab while Garth was unloading the garbage when the truck suddenly started to roll backward.

Carrie, who is a few years older than I am, stepped on the brake, clutch and gas all at the same time. Meanwhile, I’m sure Garth never moved so fast in his life to get himself and his little sisters to safety.

Years later, in 2015, when I was still living in southwest Saskatchewan, Robert, the kids and I took a road trip. I made sure to take them out to see the nuisance ground. That’s also where Dad once found an old trumpet. He cleaned it up for me, and I later played it in the school band.

From the top of that hill you could see Glidden, Mom and Dad’s farm and, a little farther west, the Dankin elevators.

As we drove back down the hill, I pointed out where Cutbank Lake’s waters flowed and told them the story about how their grandpa nearly drowned in that same lake as a young boy, a few miles upstream.

I always felt safe on the farm. Those little lessons that were engrained in me as a young girl still stay with me more than fifty years later.

And every time I drive that stretch of Highway 21, I still find myself looking for those elevators at Dankin.

I miss them.